Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, influence, and how to protect against the unknown? If so, then welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
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I am perhaps the world's greatest procrastinator who needs pressure in order to succeed. And I began making a habit of putting off schoolwork until crunch periods dictated that not only just one or two all-nighters were required, but an entire week-long stretch of them, punctuated with only cat naps in between. And I started doing these marathon sessions two or three times per semester. They wrecked me, but they also achieved the results that I was looking for. And so I kept them up. That is until one fateful night.
We were living in student townhouses in my senior year, and while they were the nicest dorms on campus, they were also the furthest from anything else around, with only wood surrounding them on all but one side. I had just returned from my Walmart run in the middle of the night to get some coke, a key vital ingredient to my bloodstream to this day, although now it is diet or zero. And I began walking from the gravel-lined parking lot to my back door with only a handful of weakly illuminating lights to show the way.
I was about halfway through my 30-foot trip when in my heart of hearts I just knew that there was a pack of demons just waiting in the shadows of the woods to my back, and they were about to pounce on me now. I have never ran so fast in my life. I threw open the door, tossed my recently purchased coke on the decrepit couch sitting next to me, and hurriedly slammed my body against the door to close it. And as I stood there, breathing heavily in the dark, listening for any sounds that would herald the beginning of the end, I knew that something was very, very wrong.
Not with my college campus that dark evening or with the woods that I had just ran from, but with me, I was in the grips of a paranoid delusion, something that I had never experienced before, but somehow I was still able to recognize. And all of this was brought on by sleep deprivation. And after considering how stupid I had just behaved, rather than downing a coke right then and there, in order to keep pushing through the mountain of work that I had allowed to accumulate, I promptly marched my happy butt upstairs and collapsed into bed and slept for more than 12 hours straight.
That moment stands out in my memory, for it was at that moment that I swore off all all-nighters, unless in the most dire of circumstances, and then only one at a time. And to date, I have only pulled five in those intervening 25 years. Welcome back to Southern Demonology. As always, I am your host, JJ, and we are now in season five, episode two, and I greatly appreciate you joining me yet again. But today we're not here to discuss my stupidity, which apparently I am all too happy to share to anyone who happens to listen, but rather to shift focus and talk about dreams.
And before I launch into the recent events that scared me to death and ultimately led to this episode in the first place, I'd like to take a step back and do a little background. I've covered some of this before, but it's been across multiple podcasts and episodes, and so I'd rather condense it all here for the record. I, like my mother and uncle, have predominantly nightmares, and it's been like that for my entire life. As opposed to my mother who mainly dreams about more mundane scenarios.
Mine involve monsters, undead of all varieties, and those that I have no identifiable name for, and I've died in my dreams more than once. Whether it's falling from a great height and feeling my bones break to being in a sci-fi setting and being dissolved by a plasma gun. All of them are unpleasant, to say the least. Yet with all of these, there is no pain. My body expects it in those situations, and my mind always notes the curious absence of it. Thank goodness for very small miracles.
The other common factor in many of my dreams is that they typically take place in labyrinthine structures, such as gigantic malls, hotels, or most often, schools. And that's even though I graduated from grad school twenty-four years ago, it's still a very frequent setting. And I do mean labyrinthine instructor. But in college, I had a series of three dreams that were dramatically different from anything else I have ever had. For that is when the demons came. And while the last one has faded from memory, beyond the fact that it too was in the same genre, the first two never will.
In the first, a withered man in a tattered robe and evil visage, took me by the shoulders and flew me up into the heavens, while showing me an apocalyptic scene filled with destruction, death, and decay. He then landed us on a hillside all the while whispering tales of woe into my ear, as if they were the sweet nothings said to a romantic partner. And the thing that stuck with me is he blamed me for what I saw. The second one was even worse.
I found myself in a twilight world dominated by a huge city, and I found myself on the roof of a skyscraper, all around me, towering structures made of slate gray with bizarre, almost non-Euclidean geometry. Smaller squat buildings with odd angles were on the same roof as I, and I was able to hide behind them, and hide I needed to, as there was a thing stalking me. It stood at least eight foot tall and bore a resemblance to an anthropomorphic crow.
Its beak was huge and hooked, but its eyes, oh god's eyes, were the most terrifying, as they were literal whirls of madness that shone with an inner light and then faded into a gray at the outer limits. In its wingslash hands was a gigantic pair of scissors or shears, with one end pointed like a long sword and the other blunt like a chopped off machete. Both sides of the shears were rusted and pitted with age, and the thing kept shaking them together with a screeching sound.
The entity itself was silent, though as it stalked me amongst the eerie buildings, it did catch me, and as I backed into the wall of one of these structures, it grinned as it threatened to place the implement of destruction around my neck. The last thing I remember is staring deeply into those eyes, and knowing that they offered only a direct path to hell. I will also mention that around this time was when I was first assigned the task in a theology class of reading Malachi Martin's book Hostage to the Devil.
Now this may provide a very convenient reason as to why I had three such dreams, or it could be a coincidence. I'm not asserting anything that may provide a reason as I wish you to draw your own conclusions. Not because I wish to avoid doing so, or to provide the illusion that I'm leading you to an answer by just making you come up with it, but because I do not have one, though I dearly hope that I did. Moreover, I have had no more dreams of demons since that period, and I have counted myself very fortunate indeed. That is, until the middle of March of this year, 26 years later.
But before we get there, I have one more type of unique dream that I need to cover before getting to recent events. And that is what I experienced in Japan. I originally covered this in one of my very early episodes, so forgive the repetition of events. I was staying in a furnished apartment in the heart of Tokyo during that time while working for my company. It was a beautiful place with a huge balcony that was almost the size of my entire apartment, and I had an amazing view of Tokyo Tower.
It also directly overlooked a rather sizable graveyard that I had a tendency to walk past on my way to get coffee or go to the discount megastore Dawn King, which I did regularly. One night I was up working late and finally fell asleep close to dawn, and I immediately dreamed of a transparent entity that was streaming the word Haidu into my head over and over again. Yet it wasn't a sound that I could hear with my ears, but was it was rather forcefully injected straight into my brain. And for the first time ever, I felt pain in a dream.
Yet this was a type of pain I had never felt in my entire life, as it wasn't physical, but almost rather psychic in nature. The next thing I knew, I was jolted awake by my phone sounding an earthquake alarm nearby. However, that word was stuck in my head, even though I did not know the meaning of it. So I ran to my Japanese English dictionary to look it up, and there the chills became very, very tangible. As I saw the meaning was to enter. This thing was demanding entry, and I knew that even if I was capable of doing it, then it would be the very last thing that I ever did.
After that day, I refused to walk by that graveyard, or even stare at it from long from the top of the balcony, and I kept a healthy supply of purified salt and omati on hand so that I could place at least the salt by the entranceways. On that note, last year I actually stumbled across a video on TikTok which captured at least the feeling of that dream. It honestly scared me so badly that I threw my phone across the room, and I will link that in the show notes in case you were interested in checking it out.
And with that, the history lesson is complete, and we can march into the events of mid-March. On night one, I dreamed of a barren landscape, essentially a desert, that was filled with only shadows and death. Fires were spread all around, but that's not what I could really focus upon, and you'll see why. For the view that dominated my sight was a mountain of dead and dying bodies. Sitting atop this godforsaken heap was a woman. She had raven black hair and a pixie cut and tight-fitting black clothing that looked leather, but I somehow doubt that it was.
Her face was ageless and in a more mundane context. She could have easily been a supermodel, but that was definitely something about her cold, dead gaze that would persuade any sane person to view her as repulsive. Her eyes either reflected the fires burning all around, or they contained their own inner flame. Either way, they gazed down upon me from her throne of smoldering dead. She said not a word to me, but rather took me in her arms. However, there was nothing loving about the act, and I would have desperately fought such an embrace if I had had any control over my body at all.
While looking down at me with a sneer on her lips, she casually with one fell action pulled the flesh from my face and arms, and as often happens in dreams, the shift of focus became not through my eyes, but of a third person looking upon me. And I could see myself with only my bloody musculature showing and my eyes wide from both horror and the severe lack of any eyelids, and I felt pain.
Not nearly as severe as such an act would demand, but I felt it, and it was physical in nature, and thankfully that jolted me awake, but I could still feel the echoes of it humming across my skin and my mind reeling in horror. And when my heart slowed down finally, and I could eventually fall back to sleep, the nightmare would begin again. I am not a recurrent dreamer, but I could not escape this dream for what felt like the rest of the night. Needless to say, I did not have a particularly restful sleep. However, that day was busy, and I was able to put it out of mind for the rest of the day.
And then the second night began. This dream was extremely short and started off seemingly.
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Beautiful. I saw what looked like a stunning blonde-haired woman, angelic in nature, from a side profile, surrounded by a greenish-yellow diffuse light, and sparkles hovered in the air around her. The scene could have been ripped from an anime still, but rather than feel peace, all I felt was unease and disgust. See, I have had an aversion to the color yellow ever since the age of four. I'm not repulsed nor fearful of it, but I have a good bit of distrust for that particular hue. And it's all from a dream I had as a very young kid.
And I promise, yes, there is a tad bit more history, but it's very short, I promise you. At that age, I had a very vibrant dream that I owned a Bert doll. You know, from Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. Well, as I was carrying it around the house and outside on the front porch of what was then the old house, the color from Bert came off the doll and got on my hands. And no matter what I did to try to rub them clean, the yellow kept spreading. First to the rest of my body, and then to the surrounding environment, and eventually engulfing my family as well.
The world became a wash with this dull yellow, and everyone and everything in it became very sick. Now, back to my more recent dream. This yellow that surrounded the non-angel was that exact same hue. The next thing I knew, I clutched my head in pain, and my vision was filled with what looked like a CT scan of my brain. And that same yellow was spreading throughout my head like the same virus that bothered me so much from my four-year-old self. And then I woke up. And just like in the first dream, I felt pain.
At this point, I am more than mildly concerned to not only dream of such entities, but to also have pain in my dreams. I'd only ever experienced pain with whatever the entity in Japan was, so I knew this couldn't be good. However, I breathed a small sigh of relief when the third night came and went without any disturbing dreams. I thought I was in the clear from the curse of three that I experienced back in college. But after the past few nights of horrid sleep, my body was exhausted. And so, as I'm wont to do during my lunch break, as I have the privilege of working from home, I took a nap.
And dear Lord, do I wish I didn't, for it was the longest and most brutal of the trilogy. I found myself in the abbey of a grand Catholic church, and I was dressed as a priest, and it appeared as if a mass had just concluded, and there were a few other priests along with twenty or so parishioners milling about in the large space. The abbey itself was beautiful, with a huge set of ancient yet durable doors serving as the entranceway made of deep mahogany.
The floor in front of the doors was tiled and ran for twenty feet or so until a small set of three steps elevated the chapel from the rest of the church. To the right side, facing the doors, was a wall made entirely of glass and metal. Multiple doors led out to a balcony, and a beautiful set of stained glass rested above those doors. The piece of that this church had was then shattered by someone screaming out, Run, it's coming.
And at that moment the extremely thick wooden doors that capped the front of the building caved inwards, and a thing lumbered into that abbey, desecrating the sacred space. It had the body of a dragon, blackened scales with four legs ending in sharp talons. But that wasn't the focal point. Rather, it was where the head should have been. Rather than one, this thing had a multitude, beyond counting, all slick black and looking like gigantic carnivorous worms wiggling independently of one another.
The thing ponderously lumbered into the building and began eviscerating anyone it could reach, either with its heads lashing out and chomping people in half, or via these strange tentacles that sprouted from its back, whipping out with blade-like appendages on the end of them. People began to scream, and others started directing people to flee out the side doors to the balcony, because at the end of this balcony was a set of switchback stairs that descended several floors until ground level could be reached at the bottom of the hill on which that church was constructed.
However, the beast that had invaded the sanctum had another unwelcome surprise in store. It had a tail that stretched out for seemingly miles, and growing out of these appendages were plant like buds with tormented faces with copious amounts of teeth, and this tail had been strategically wrapped all the way around the entirety of this church, but especially the stairs leading down. As I began sprinting toward and down the stairs, these things bit and tore at my legs unrelentingly, and once again I felt pain in this dream.
Yet this pain was much worse than any other that I had experienced in the other two dreams, even though the wounds were much more superficial. Somehow it truly felt as if the skin on my legs were being shredded by these teeth. However, after what felt like an eternity, I finally traversed the stairs and made it to a cluster of other priests and lay people who were at the bottom. I somehow knew that I had knowledge that no one else in that assembly did.
And so I sought out a particular priest who had an elevated stature above everyone else to warn him that the beast was after him and would gladly annihilate anyone else in its way to get to him. That man smiled upon me with such a beatific smile and said not to worry, and that he would not shy away from his duty to combat it. However, I knew that he would not, could not, ever be successful in his endeavor. Almost as if I had time traveled from the recent future just to warn him against such an eventuality. That was how sure I was in the knowledge.
Yet no matter how much I pleaded or begged with him, he still marched forth to confront the demon. And as he was being torn asunder, I awoke in a cold sweat, the pain in my legs fading in comparison to that in my heart, for I knew that the man was our last hope, and that had just been wiped away from the face of the earth. A few days later, I had the pleasure of being the guest on Nicolayan TV's Vestiges After Dark, which was my third appearance on that program, and the first which was not plagued by other technical difficulties.
And before the interview began, which was over demonology in the Hebrew Bible, I asked the bishop who runs the show about the possible meanings behind these dreams, especially the pain part. And he had a very interesting theory. As all of this took place during Lent, he stated that the barriers between this world and the next were naturally weaker, and that that could help explain the origin of these dreams. In fact, he was kind enough to send me a delivery kit that members receive after a three-month duration, which consists of a crucifix in addition to exercise oil and holy water.
In fact, I did an unboxing of this incredibly kind gift and posted it to both YouTube and TikTok. I'll post a link to this video as well in the description. I also brought these dreams up with Father Birdsong, a good friend and fellow contributor to both this podcast and the paranormal rundown. He flatly stated that he sensed the demonic influence upon these dreams and offered to send me some holy water as well.
While I haven't had any further demonic dreams, and I pray it stays that way, though I have little hope of that actually happening, I did experience one other dream oddity just last week, and I thought I'd bring it up here. Thankfully, this wasn't a scary experience, but one that simply made me scratch my head. About a month and a half ago prior, I dreamed I was working in downtown Tokyo in a large restaurant, and I had decided to go down the street and do some shopping. I wandered down an incredibly busy street and proceeded into a mall made up of at least three levels, perhaps more.
Now, while I have been blessed with a very detailed memory and sense of direction, this place was like a maze, and I kept getting turned around. However, there were a few places that stood out, like a food court that featured a boba shop ran by a friendly husband and wife team and a very upscale restaurant on the second floor. I kept attempting to navigate the space, but I somehow found myself back in these two locales in particular. Now, keep in mind that even though my brain told me that this was Tokyo, it resembled nowhere that I had ever been in that country.
Now, last week I dreamed that I went for a walk from my apartment that my wife and I share, once again, back in Tokyo, and I found myself walking upon a store a 15-minute trek away that was in a very stylish modern building composed of wood green and black siding with English branding all over the front of it. And rather than go in, I turned around and noticed that the sky was growing dark in the middle of the day. And then I suddenly remembered that this was the day of the solar eclipse, and that I needed to run back home so my wife and I could look at it together.
After some random encounters with other Gaijan or foreigners, some positive, some negative, I found myself back in a mall. And after turning around a few random corners, I nearly stepped into an upper class restaurant. And it was then that I recognized it as the place as belonging to the same mall I had dreamed of earlier. And I knew, without knowing how, that if I went downstairs, there would be a food court, and in it would be a boba shop ran by that friendly husband and wife, duo. And while the word dream never once occurred to me, I am not a lucid dreamer at all.
I just immediately accept that whatever I'm seeing is reality. I'd be in real trouble if I was ever in a Star Trek episode where everyone was trapped in their dream. I suddenly knew the quickest way out of them all, and so I could get back to my wife. So I would love to know from y'all. What strangeness have you encountered in your dreams? Have you dreamed of demons or angels? Have you found yourself in fictional locales that you suddenly recognize from previous dreams? I am not the type of person who put significance on my nighttime delusions.
In fact, I have often considered that one of the primary functions of dreams to be a memory dump where items in short-term memory that are deemed an essential are purged. That may also account for why dreams are so ephemeral in that even after repeating their events over and over to oneself in order to try to keep a memory of them, they can still so quickly and effortlessly fade from mine. But I don't think that partial theory could explain the physical pain I felt in these dreams of the demonic I had, nor in coming up with brand new sensations never experienced, as in my Japan encounter.
Further, wouldn't the ephemeral nature also discount recognizing a place previously encountered before only if in another dream I find myself with unanswered questions, and that leaves me more uncomfortable than anything else. I seek to know that has always been a driving force for all of my life. While the mysteries are alluring, albeit frightening, they are also deeply frustrating as there's no ready-made pass for a solution, or even hints at possible answers. I do hope you'll forgive me for such a radical departure in my normal content and the delay in getting this episode out.
It took far longer and was much more emotionally draining to complete the strip that could provide a glimpse into what I experienced without boring you to tears. For I fully know listening to someone else recount random events in a random place all jumbled together can be one of the most boring of exercises humanly known. And I hope that I at least kept you somewhat entertained during this retelling. Until next time. Stay safe. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com, which offers links to all of our social media and episodes.
Southern Demonology is solely owned, produced, and edited by myself, and the intro and outro music are composed by me as well. If you have a moment, please rate, like, and share this podcast, as it is the best way to help support my work. As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.
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